Solitude

'No man is an island' is a famous quote from the English metaphysical poet John Donne. He wrote Devotions  which consisted of 23 chronologically ordered sections – representing the length, in days, of Donne's illness. Each one contained a 'meditation', in which he describes a stage of his illness, an 'expostulation' containing his reaction to that stage, and finally a prayer in which he makes peace with the disease. The popular quote, modernly assigned to the necessity of human interaction, is an extracted line from his Devotions written in 1642, specifically from his 17th Meditation;


No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if aPromontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. [Donne, 1923. Pg 28]



For a certain period of time when I was in my teenage years, I thought that this was not only a false statement in which it was used to force human interaction, but  a challenge that I would as well take on in order to prove everyone wrong. I therefore took it upon myself to customise my daily schedule into mastering the art of solitude and human distance. Personally, I thought it was an easy challenge as I was still in the stage where social interaction was not as much a priority as much as literary materials with the main exercise of ‘Fill-a-Doodle’.


As I aged, I came into a realisation that it was getting more difficult to withdraw from conversations and interactions. And the adage that has recurred over centuries might as well be true. But I got thinking; why is solitary confinement a punishment familiar and fondly used in the correctional department? Why is the idea of solitude constructed around a boulder of torture and repression?


Solitary confinement has over the decades been used as a tool of repression towards criminals who are identified as super-predators in the society and in the prisons. Of course, the ideology of solitary confinement  does not only consist of the prisoner being consumed by ennui and utter loneliness, but small constrictive spaces which measure less meterage than a city parking spot. Solitary confinement has also been used as many corrections officials say it’s a necessary tool to control a dangerous prison population.


Social scientists have justified that isolation in so worrisome and that extreme circumstances can cause dire and significant mental and psychological harm on prisoners such as: lethargy, heightened anxiety, extreme obsessive compulsiveness, chronic depression, violent fantasies and hallucinations and even suicidal ideations.


What exactly leads a human being to a state of extreme mental consumption that he or she cannot carry themselves through personal solitude? During the latter decades of the 19th century, prison psychiatry flourished, and studies were done in order to get extensive knowledge on prisoners' minds during isolation and the basic dispositional traits in the correctional situation. This is reflected in the history of the Vridsløselille penitentiary in Denmark, which operated as a Pennsylvania-model institution with strict solitary confinement from 1859 to the early 1930s. Researchers discovered that the power of the prison context was downplayed and there was a necessity in learning intensely and extensively on the biological “degeneration” among criminals as an alternative explanation.


A part from the understanding of solitude from the perspective of the correctional system, we will take a homonymous direction to the individualistic and predisposed understanding of solitude. ‘No man is an island’ coincides and complements the notion that all network structures in human interaction have some effects on the actions of the actors enmeshed in these human networks. The actors in this context are family, friends, acquaintances and colleagues. It is the basic understanding that the human constitution is an inter-webbed space that grows and works in effect of other bodies of interaction. The quote that Donne coined highlights the universal recognition of the ultimate interconnectedness of humanity. It is the realisation that everything and everyone is connected as part of a continuous energy field.


Moreover, as much as human interaction is constructed by the mitosis of connectivity, solitude is a concept that needs to be comprehended by human beings and integrated in a quotidian basis. Indeed, in today’s world of constant stimulation and interconnectivity, the art of solitude is in graver danger of squander than ever, more and more susceptible to festering into the toxic sister aberrations of ennui and boredom.


In the 4th Century BC, Aristotle reproached, "The man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to
share because he is already self-sufficient, is no part of the polis, and must therefore be either a beast or a god”. He was not the only man that saw solitude as an absurdity. In Greek tragedies, solitude was often regarded as a fate worse than death. The ancient world held solitude as the most extreme means of reprimand,  second only to execution. For more than two millennia, this fear and loathing of solitary life was customised and sieved into the fabric of society.


Modernity offers a curious paradox of connectedness and loneliness. Our perpetually networked selves cling to constant communication in an effort to avoid the deep-seated sense of loneliness we so dread. Somewhere along the way, we forget — or maybe never even learn — how to be alone and how to stay contented in our own company. Legendary Russian Filmmaker and write, Andrei Tarkovsky said, "This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to be spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.”


We need to be in wander and appreciation of our mind’s lack of social preoccupation. The human mind works in a way that if the brain is customised to isolation, thoughts are arranged and organised in a way that when unwounded, they are not  immense to the thinker.  Amidst the present times of constant access to refreshed, recurring and unmediated influx of external stimulation, a mind that is incompatible to solitude quickly delves into confusion and is prone to inordinate entanglement.


In solitude, we get to know ourselves in our extremities. We appreciate ourselves in the utmost private situations, laugh at what we think are our saddest jokes and emote without feeling responsible for apologising to a crowd. I end this short essay with stating that solitude is stigmatised to be the actualisation and reality of a sad life. And it should not be so.

"That is why I got into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish from myself and rob me of my should and I grow angry with everybody and fear everybody”, said Friedrich Nietzsche in Nietzsche: Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality.